Father's Love: Freedom from Bitter Roots

As I was preparing to teach in our School of Ministry, I was impacted by a teaching on "Bitter Roots" by Elijah House Ministries.  You know it is encouraging when the Holy Spirit takes what you have learned in other places in Scripture, life, and through other teaching to confirm an important point.  The question:  Why aren't all people prospering in their lives?  One answer is that the roots of their lives are nourishing them but the nourishment is actually poison.

All of us have roots in our lives, these are the deeply held beliefs about our identity, others, life, and even God.  The law of sowing and reaping has been in place ever since the earth has existed.  This law dictates that whatever is sown reaps in like kind, for example a corn seed will grow corn roots and grow into a corn plant reaping a corn harvest.  This is a natural example, yet the spiritual law was in place that dictated what is on the earth.  Hebrews 12:14-15 says, "Pursue peace with all men, and the sanctification without which no one will see the Lord.  See to it that no one comes short of the grace of God; that no root of bitterness springing up causes trouble, and by it many be defiled; "

When in the formation of our identity as we are growing from infancy into childhood, we don't receive the appropriate nurture, encouragement, discipline/guidance, and love then we can have bitter roots.  The bitter roots do not come from how we were treated in the relationship but from our own judgements (sinful response to hurts) of those who failed us.  Our unmet needs will tempt us to point to judging those who did not meet our needs or rejected our needs, thus their sin against us tempts us to sin against them.  This cycle will lead to the development in our hearts and lives of bitter root structures that will then lead to trees that produce bad fruit.

In Father's love for us, Jesus came to take the punishment for our sin of judgement on others for how they hurt us and thus made a way for us to forgive and cut off those bitter roots.  We do not have to be captive to the judgements of people who hurt us, we can extend grace to them and be free.

We are told in Ephesians 3:17 says, we are to be "...rooted and grounded in love..." but as we can see we also have a choice to be rooted and grounded in bitterness towards ourselves, God, others, and life.  Freedom is a choice and we must uproot those old structures of the heart, as we walk in Father's love and forgive as He forgave us in Christ.

Rooted in Love,
Bret